Features

When Zoogle left home almost two weeks ago, he was a generic blob of baby flesh, indistinguishable (except in size, and perhaps curvature) from any other swaddlable entity: cute, sweet tempered, and not particularly nap-inclined, that was Z. But to judge from the pictures I've received, features are beginning to coalesce rapidly. Exhibit A, Child Left: the intentionality in that look is palpable. I do not know if this is Bennie the Scientist on the cusp of a eureka moment, Benny the Player on the brink of a score, or Benny the Evil Genius taking stalk of his race, but there is a nefarious intelligence in that look that speaks of Wild Times in the future.

I, in contrast, am losing features. For every additional hour I stay up and work on my paper, I lose one more feature. Like rats on a ship: they can sense the shift in ballast. Perhaps this is my connection to Cosmico these days. When features leave me, they head over to him, a scurring, piecemeal Trasmigration that takes them under the waters, past customs, into the eucalyptus groves and up to the fourth floor apartment, where they dodge the suegra and scamper past the traps of language to cast themselves likes sprinkles on the moist frosting-soul beyond the Cheeks and the Lone Tooth.